This is unbelievable. Well, not really. We can add to the list of state run forensic labs who kow-tow to prosecutors needing felony drug possession convictions.
How families lost custody of their children.
https://news.vice.com/article/this-canadian-lab-spent-20-years-ruining-lives
No matter how folks minimize or ignore the effect of overstated or flawed forensic opinions in the US CJ system, exoneration and remanded cases continue to build clear evidence to the contrary.
This particular case deals with the FBI’s elite unit of “hair matchers” that walked tall before DNA testing came online.
The culture of accepting all government oriented and defense forensic examiners as “scientists” with “no doubts” still exists as it did in the day of these hair pattern experts.
“In 2009, a panel of the National Academy of Sciences commissioned by Congress reported that although forensic examiners have long claimed to be able to match pattern evidence — such as hair samples, shoe and tire treads, bitemarks or marks on fired bullets — to a source with “absolute” or “scientific certainty,” only DNA analysis had been validated through statistical research.
Courts have continued to admit the other types of forensic evidence citing precedent, however, and rarely reopen related convictions in the absence of new DNA results.”
Of course the appointment started with the state governor, went to the Senate and then got rubber stamped by the NY State Bar. Deskovic has a history of receviving less than fair treatment by the NY judicial system. He was exonerated after 16 years in state prison containing years of frustration with the state’s appellate system. He received a large compensation award, became a lawyer, started a foundation to support judicial reform and watchdogs the criminal justice system. He has some choice words for the appointee Janet DiFiore’s vetting process and her saying that Deskovic’s case contained no prosecutorial misconduct. Other choice statements from her were that pros miscon is “not a problem.”
He wasn’t invited to any of the vetting proceedings. Hum, that sounds familiar.
When science is not important, forensic evidence is just hocus-pocus ( i.e. mumbo-jumbo; “complicated activity or language usually intended to obscure and confuse” ) in the courtroom.
All I can say from the cases in The Latest from the World of Bite mark Evidence is that…..
Here is what law prof Brendan Garrett’s Forensics Forum has to say about this:
Steven Avery’s lawyer has said that she has new evidence she believes will exonerate the man made famous by Netflix documentary Making A Murderer.
Avery is the focus of Making A Murderer, the Netflix documentary which tells the story of his conviction for the murder of Teresa Halbach in 2005. Both and nephew Brendan Dassey are serving life sentences for the murder, having been convicted in 2007. Making A Murderer pays particular attention to perceived injustices in the case.
Avery was the focus of a new episode of Dateline NBC on Friday (January 29). The series has featured an episode on Avery and his trial once before, back in 2006, but picked up on it again after the Netflix series became a hit at the start of the year.
Among those interviewed in the Dateline special was Avery’s new lawyer, wrongful conviction specialist Kathleen Zellner. She revealed details of fresh forensic evidence which she says will prove Avery is innocent.
“Generally, since 2007, there have been significant advances in forensic testing … the clearest way to do this is with scientific testing,” Zellner said in her first TV interview since taking the case. “Am I going to tell you exactly what it is? I am not. But it’s been a long time. There was a lot of evidence that wasn’t tested.”
Zellner also tweeted about her case, telling followers that she had taken news of the forensic evidence to Avery.
Read more at http://www.nme.com/filmandtv/news/-making-a-murderer-steven-avery-s-lawyer-claims-sh/398361#6iLlUUBRx0TKWDVO.99
Kathleen Zellner is an exoneration machine as she has 17 victories, mostly in Illinois. You need to know she is an expert at ferreting out police and prosecutorial misconduct. I would say she wrote the book on it. AS of a week ago, she is now Steven Avery’s defense co-counsel. The other new attorney for Avery is Midwest Innocence Project director Tricia Bushnell.
Here she is media talking the Steven Avery case. You might say finding a neutral jury pool for a potential new Avery case may be hard to deliver. Anyway, she is doing a great job deconstructing the facts used by the prosecutors.
What she says about forensics aiding the exoneration is just a glimpse on her future targeting of the prosecution’s case. She has been on Twitter blowing them into little pieces for the last week. @ZellnerLaw .
http://patch.com/illinois/downersgrove/kathleen-zellner-nbcs-dateline-first-steven-avery-interview
More on Twitter
http://abcnews.go.com/US/steven-averys-attorney-discusses-making-murderer-case/story?id=36614686
http://uproxx.com/tv/making-a-murderer-steven-avery-lawyer-kathleen-zellner/2/
http://gawker.com/steven-averys-defense-attorney-and-prosecutor-address-i-1756015707
Remember your Chemistry classes?
Salt Lake County homicide detective Todd Park was in Reno, Nevada, for a conference about serial killers in 2007 when he first heard about what he calls “the isotope stuff.” A colleague at the meeting described the forensic potential of isotope research being done by IsoForensics, a Salt Lake City company, and Park quickly realized that the science might help identify the victim in a homicide case he had worked on seven years earlier.
http://nij.gov/journals/276/Pages/tracking-movements-with-isotopes.aspx
For those who commented that the recent “updating” of DNA population mixture statistics would be merely a mini-blip in its potential effect on criminal cases, this Texas state-wide revisit of DNA aided convictions should be a downer.
Galveston County District Attorney Jack Roady, right, and Matthew Shawhan, an assistant district attorney for the county, show an image of a screwdriver believed to have been used by German Perez-Vasquez in a homicide. DNA analysis on the screwdriver initially showed there was a 1 in 290 million chance that a different person of a similar ethnic background to the defendant had touched it. The new protocol, released back in January 2010 but implemented unevenly across the country, found a 1 in 38 chance.
Dallas News (open access)
Kathleen Zellner is an exoneration machine as she has 17 victories, mostly in Illinois. You need to know she is an expert at ferreting out police and prosecutorial misconduct. I would say she wrote the book on it. AS of a week ago, she is now Steven Avery’s defense co-counsel. The other new attorney for Avery is Midwest Innocence Project director Tricia Bushnell.
Here she is media talking the Steven Avery case. You might say finding a neutral jury pool for a potential new Avery case may be hard to deliver. Anyway, she is doing a great job deconstructing the facts used by the prosecutors.
What she says about forensics aiding the exoneration is just a glimpse on her future targeting of the prosecution’s case. She has been on Twitter blowing them into little pieces for the last week. @ZellnerLaw .
http://patch.com/illinois/downersgrove/kathleen-zellner-nbcs-dateline-first-steven-avery-interview
More on Twitter
http://abcnews.go.com/US/steven-averys-attorney-discusses-making-murderer-case/story?id=36614686
http://uproxx.com/tv/making-a-murderer-steven-avery-lawyer-kathleen-zellner/2/
http://gawker.com/steven-averys-defense-attorney-and-prosecutor-address-i-1756015707
A writer with an industrial chemistry background as a few things to say about the reality of confusion surrounding the “Making of a Murder” documentary. She focuses on the blood evidence from the second murder and makes some good points. She clearly differentiates between “forensic” science and what she is used to. Here’s a quote:
“But the key here is that we’re talking about forensic science, not beverage chemistry. Beverage chemistry, in this case, is much more exacting. Was there really no EDTA in the blood swabbed from victim Teresa Halbach’s vehicle, or was the chemical simply too diluted or degraded to be detected with the FBI’s method? Could the test have missed a small amount of EDTA? It would be hard to say without further experiments that replicate crime scene conditions, experiments that essentially put the test to the test.”
http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2016/01/26/are-these-crime-drama-clues-fact-or-fiction/
Plus more from the perspective that the Avery cases reveals how prosecutorial misconduct is no myth in the US and is the salient point to the documentary’s message.
Its just a blip of biology, according to the Scottish authorities and their reviewers. Here’s the gist of what took place but doesn’t explain why it took years to review…….is it the prosecution looking bad? If you read the article, a reviewing scientist says one shouldn’t use just a spot of blood to render an opinion. That’s not borne out by the numbers of “trace” DNA prosecutions seen in the US. But this is Scotland, I guess.
“A minute quantity of his DNA [a defendant later acquited ] was found on the handle of one of the guns used to kill Mr Carroll.
This was discredited, however, when it also emerged that the DNA of a lab technician, who had never touched the gun, was also found in the sample analysed by forensic scientists, along with that of three unidentified men.”
